Superbug Spread Reveals Thin Pipeline of Newest Antibiotics

Every year at least 23,000 Americans die from bacterial infections that don’t have effective treatments, including two patients killed in a recent outbreak in a Los Angeles hospital that has spurred new attention on the issue.

While public health experts say the risk from infections of drug-resistant “superbugs” has been growing, the pipeline of new antibiotics to treat them hasn’t kept pace. Doctors are forced to rely on decades-old medicines with sometimes heavy side effects to treat everything from urinary tract infections to deadly hospital-acquired bacteria such as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the pathogen in the Los Angeles cases.